References and Endnotes
- The complaint that training, funding and staffing are insufficient for the organisation's needs is not, of course, peculiar to low morale/high burnout organisations: ‘We have never known of a human service agency of any kind that asserted that it had the resources to accomplish its goals. That is to say, the demand for the agency's services always exceeds what the agency feels it can and should supply. The solution, far more often than not, is put in terms of obtaining more money to hire more staff.’ (Sarason et al, 1977 , 19.)
- I am indebted here to Rebekah Hart, who used the term ‘manic-depressive’ to apply to staff behaviour in her article Survival in Isolation (Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy Vol 7 , No 3 ( September 1986 ). 127 ).
- Several bodies of testimony and speculation bear on the notion that professional helpers adopt their calling in response to personal or family dysfunction. The concept of the wounded healer is common to many cultures (Lewis, 1971 ) and it has sometimes been acknowledged as personally applicable by psychiatrists and other healers in our own. Freud's recommendation that the would-be psychoanalyst undertake a ‘training analysis’ and experience the role of patient was rooted in his own midlife self-analysis, which supplied the bulk of the material for the Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900). Belief that personal experience of therapy is necessary to ‘clear one's own blocks’ is strongly held in growth-oriented therapies like Gestalt and Psychodrama, and has even survived in the earlier generation of system-oriented therapies (see e.g. Luthman, 1974, 209ff; Bowen, 1978, 317ff). While few published therapists directly acknowledge that personal distress influenced their choice of profession, a few mention the existence of a troubled person in their extended family (e.g. Honig, 1972, 3). Such scattered references are confirmed by the genograms collected in McGoldrick and Gerson (1985), which make it very clear that most of the leaders of the psychiatric profession have come from families with one or more impaired members. Failure to adopt a systemic or contextual view of the helper's choice of profession has led to burnout and stress being considered solely as functions of the work environment and the individual personality of the helper (see e.g. Rippere and Williams, 1985; Scott and Hawk, 1986). It is my conviction that such limited perspectives, which lead to ineffective ‘stress management’ programmes, are likely simply to perpetuate the problem .
- So far as I know, no empirical data have yet been collected to support the contention that organisations tend to replicate personalities within their staff teams. Staff members to whom I have spoken readily admit that now appointees often resemble those they replace, but dismiss this as ‘coincidental’. My hypothesis is that an unconscious tendency to maintain the system (staff team) at its present level of functioning is involved. However, it is also possible to argue that the system may select a newcomer who is genuinely dissimilar to his/her predecessor, but then induct him or her in such a way that individuality is nullified (see Janis, 1983 , for the power of small groups to ‘pull’ new members into line with group norms, so that initially dissident team members must either be ‘converted’ or be extruded).
- See Bowen ( 1978 ), 376 – 7 .
- The term good-enough is of course Winnicott's, originally applied by him to mothering, and so by extension to the therapist-patient relationship . ( Winnicott , 1965 ; Guntrip , 1971, 113ff) .
- For the notion of ‘failure to notice success’ I am indebted to the innovative clinical thinking and practice of Michael White of Adelaide and David Epston of Auckland.
- The computer-scored questionnaire PREPARE, devised by the Family Social Science department at the University of Minnesota, and in its Australian version widely administered to pre-marital couples in this country, has done more for the cause of pre-marriage preparation than most sermons, counselling and marriage preparation groups. The reasons for its success lie in its perceived ‘objectivity’, and the fact that it often lays bare in a non-judgemental way massive differences in attitudes and beliefs of which the couple were previously unaware. Perhaps, then, a structured questionnaire, addressing Issues of family despair alongside issues relating to job expectations, and talked through in an atmosphere of trust and disinterested enquiry, would be a more appropriate induction/selection device than the straightforward genogram construction I have advocated?
- In fact, my proposal has its origin in the self-report of a young welfare worker who was then part of a staff team I was working with. She had privately set her own limit on her tenure, planning an overseas holiday at the end of it. In an extremely taxing job, her capacity for detachment was noticeably enhanced once this decision had been made.
- Bowen , Murray . 1978 . Family Therapy in Clinical Practice , New York : Aronson .
- Freud Sigmund ( 1900 ): The Interpretation of Dreams . Trans. James Strachey, Rev. Angela Richards. Penguin, Pelican Freud Library , 4 , 1976 .
- Guntrip , Harry . 1971 . Psychoanalytic Theory, Therapy and the Self , New York : Basic Books .
- Honig , Albert . 1972 . The Awakening Nightmare , New York : Dell Publishing .
- Janis , Irving . 1983 . Groupthink , Boston : Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Flascos. Houghton Mifflin . 2nd Rev. Edn.
- Lewis , I.M. 1971 . Ecatatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism , Hammondsworth : Penguin .
- Luthman , Shirley and Kirschenbaum , Martin . 1974 . The Dynamic Family , Palo Alto : Science and Behaviour Books .
- McGoldrick , Monica and Gerson , Randy . 1985 . Genograms in Family Assessment , New York : Norton .
- Rippere , Vicky and Williams , Ruth . 1985 . “ Wounded Healers ” . In Mental Health Workers' Experiences of Depression , New York : Wiley .
- Sarason , Semour . 1977 . Human Services and Resource Networks , San Francisco : Rationale, Possibilities and Public Policy, Jossey-Bass .
- Scott , C. and Hawk , J. , eds. 1986 . Heal Thyself , New York : The Health of Health Care Professionals, Brunner-Mazel .
- Winnlcott , Donald . 1965 . The Family and individual Development , New York : Basic Books .